I wasn’t following the buildup much at all, but decided to give it a shot, play a fair amount now and I’m having a blast.
Sure the style is very similar to their other titles, but I think it works pretty well for the setting. They might a have a big deal about all the procedural generation stuff, but honestly that’s best left ignored. I have no interest in landing randomly on a planet and finding some raider base to clear out so I can just not do that and stick to storied faction quests, side quests, corporate missions, etc. Copy paste bandit/raider camps in previous titles were harder to avoid because you’d always blunder onto them on the way to anything. Not to mention all the roving enemies to deal with.
In Starfield, I only sometimes get jumped on by pirate ships and having upgraded my ship a bit, I can usually deal with them in less than a minute. Leaving me free to do the interesting missions, and there really is a lot of them. I’ve spent much more time talking to characters than I have shooting people (almost as much as managing my inventory, LOL), and that’s how it should be in an RPG.
As with their previous games, you don’t often get meaningful choices about how quests play out. They’ve never really done this. Instead they give you an absolute tonne of options and the role playing part is about doing the things and siding with the groups that suit you. Which is fine really, it’s what I expected.
The ship building thing is actually very decent. Finally they’ve come up with something worth sinking all your cash into. Money might as well never have been a thing in Skyrim or Fallout games. Settlement building in FO4 was a pain and took a load of crafting for not much reward other than to build a home for yourself and your followers. With ship design, you can create nice little accommodations with a load of storage space for you loot, but it has to be functional, survive combat and ideally look absolutely badass. There’s no crafting bollocks behind it, just cash and ideally a few skill points for the better modules.
It’s far from perfect- a lot of systems aren’t explained at all, standard Bethesda jank is in full effect, you get railroaded into joining a group of goodie two shoes at the beginning (including all the major companions), I can fit more loot into a lunchbox on the ground than in my spaceship with cargo canisters the size of trucks bolted onto the side, etc. Bit I can deal with all that, ignore the main quest and just go on my space adventures.
I like it more than FO4, which just left me a bit cold.
